Steam Announces Family Sharing

Valve just announced that Steam will soon have family sharing. September 11, 2013 – Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another's Steam games while each earning their own Steam achievements and storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

"Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared," explained Anna Sweet of Valve. "Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests."

Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though simultaneous usage of an account’s library is not allowed, the lender may always access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.

For more information about Steam Family Sharing and the beta program, please visit store.steampowered.com/sharing.

#4654504 Posted on: 09/13/2013 09:05 AM
Nice job Steam! I don't hate Origin, have a lot of games on both of them but because things like this Steam is still my main choice when I buy games. Now let's see what EA is going to do with Origin when they see this...

P.S.
I'm sure A LOT of people will abuse this Steam feature to share games with people they don't know.

k37chup
Member Guru

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#4654567 Posted on: 09/13/2013 11:33 AMI'm sure A LOT of people will abuse this Steam feature to share games with people they don't know.

If they don't care about "friends" using cheats on their account and then getting vac banned. We will probably see allot of threads about "friends" getting vac bans of people's accounts who didn't think about that

tsunami231
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#4654741 Posted on: 09/13/2013 05:18 PM

If they don't care about "friends" using cheats on their account and then getting vac banned. We will probably see allot of threads about "friends" getting vac bans of people's accounts who didn't think about that

Hah I dont even trust my 13 year cousin on my steam account.

Could be usefull for let my uncle on my account to get at the games, he put on my account cause he refused to me his own for his kid ( he thought I was kidding when I said I wont let him play any online game on my account, let alone the CoD games).

Chouji
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#4654867 Posted on: 09/13/2013 07:58 PM
I like this idea. But already i let my little one use my steam account. If only she had my reflexes, but at least she's trying!

Ven0m
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#4655120 Posted on: 09/14/2013 08:39 AM

I like this idea. But already i let my little one use my steam account. If only she had my reflexes, but at least she's trying!

You may not reveal, share or otherwise allow others to use your password or Account.

Letting a child play using your account is kinda illegal according to that, which is absurd and it sucks. I really like they're changing it.

It happened a few times that a friend of mine has got a game and I got a notification about that which made me curious. He gave me his passes, I played a game a little, then bought it, then my brother played on my account and bought it for himself. I think that they believe in the strength of such sales.

Letting a child play using your account is kinda illegal according to that, which is absurd and it sucks. I really like they're changing it.

It happened a few times that a friend of mine has got a game and I got a notification about that which made me curious. He gave me his passes, I played a game a little, then bought it, then my brother played on my account and bought it for himself. I think that they believe in the strength of such sales.

Well, it might be an IP or computer check. Since my runt uses my computer it works out. Steam can't tell the difference.
But a heads up, i brought my little one up right. ^_^ when she was younger i let her play SNES and playstation games through emulators. She she played through and beat zelda OOT before she was 12. You don't see many kids these day that got to play the good stuff.

VultureX
Banned

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#4655392 Posted on: 09/14/2013 10:35 PM
But it only becomes interesting when you can actually play a coop game with one library.
And with current rules it seems you can't.

Ven0m
Maha Guru

Posts: 1762
Joined: 2005-08-12

#4655466 Posted on: 09/15/2013 01:34 AM
But it only becomes interesting when you can actually play a coop game with one library.
And with current rules it seems you can't.

Yeah, and they should even pay you for that.

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